New Chips Loaded With Dummy Parts

This is an interesting case of the relationship between abundant and scarce resources. It used to be that transistors were scarce, so using the silicon in order to pack them well was the optimization goal. Nowadays, transistors reached a point of zero cost, but yield and the process nodes to make them are incredibly expensive, therefore, you get "wasted" silicon.<p>In programming, this is akin to programming in assembly, when no cycle can be spared, versus programming in the highest available language, when the programmer's attention and productivity is scarce.

&#62;Intel improved the resolution of its lithography with a technique called dipole illumination, a process that splits light into two beams, sends them through reduction lenses, and projects features from different angles.<p>That's so cool that someone had to figure out how to shrink LIGHT so that one can watch cats doing cute things on YouTube.

This technique has been used in PCBs for many decades. You fill in unused parts of the PCB layers with stripes, partly to improve the manufacturing yield, and partly (in ground planes) to "debounce" the circuitry.

Interesting. Kind of the junk DNA of chips.

Wooooosh ... sound over the head of a software guy reading this.